This article outlines 5 things you can do to maintain/improve your 4-7 year old child’s reading during the school holidays. Links to relevant research are provided, tips are given and you can sign up to receive 4 free phonetically decodable digital poems for your child to read to/with you during the school holidays when you may not have enough reading books from school for them to practise with.
Further Information:
Children’s reading skills can ‘dip’ during school holidays (particularly the long summer holidays), when they may not practise reading as often as they do in term time. However, there are things you can do to prevent this happening and potentially improve their reading skills instead.
1. Read to your child:
The most important thing you can do is encourage a love of reading by reading to your child and talking with them about what you are reading. They need to be involved in choosing what is read - be that a magazine, story, comic, poem, joke book, song or non fiction text (in paper form or online).
Research shows the benefits of reading to your child include the development of their…
- phonemic awareness (the ability to hear, identify & play with individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words).
- phonics (the ability to link the sounds of spoken language with the letters of written language).
- vocabulary (words children need to know to effectively communicate with others).
- reading comprehension (the ability to understand what has been read).
- fluency (oral reading) (the ability to read text accurately, quickly and with appropriate intonation)
These things are all important in becoming a good reader.
The benefits of reading to your child also go beyond having a positive impact on their reading development and include cognitive development, creating a special bond with your child, increased concentration and discipline, improved imagination and creativity and cultivating a lifelong love of reading.
2. Visit the library with your child:
Help your child to select books which:
- match their interests.
- are written by a mixture of untried authors and those whose books your child has previously enjoyed.
- are from a mixture of genres your child likes and those they haven’t tried before eg sci-fi, historical fiction, comic style, poetry, non-fiction.
- have been recommended by friends/librarians/online recommendations (see reading challenge website link below)
This will keep reading fun and enjoyable and will enable your child to start forming opinions about things they do/don’t enjoy reading.
You may wish to register for the ‘Summer Reading Challenge’, which works with the library service to encourage children to read during the summer holidays to keep up their reading enjoyment and confidence. They can set themselves reading challenges and earn rewards for their reading. Over half of those surveyed after completing this in 2022 stated that their children felt better about themselves through taking part in the challenge and 75% had improved their reading skills.
There is also a mini winter challenge which runs from December to February. There are other useful things you can access on their website all year round too eg a book sorter tool which recommends books matched to your child’s interests and age.
3. Ensure your child reads any texts which have been sent home from school for this purpose:
To prevent your child’s reading dipping during the school holidays, it is also important for your child to continue to practise reading to you regularly – the more often they practise, the greater their progress is likely to be. Any books sent home from school for this purpose will have been closely matched to your child’s current phonics knowledge and skills to enable them to practise those skills and successfully read the text.
Tips for these reading sessions:
- Let your child hold the text and point to the words themselves if that is necessary.
- Find a time that works for you and your child, avoiding times when they are tired or find it difficult to concentrate. Some people find that first thing in the morning is a better time for them.
- Find a place in which both you and your child will be comfortable whilst they read. This makes it a more pleasurable experience.
- Break the text into chunks, which are manageable for your child. Whilst short texts can often be read in one sitting, it may be better for your child to read longer texts in shorter sections over several sessions/days. Obviously if they are really engaged in what they are reading and you have time to listen to them read a longer text in one sitting, then run with that.
To find out how to get the maximum benefit out of the times your child is reading to you, consider attending my online reading workshop 5 (there's one for both Reception & Y1 parents/carers). Further information is available on the red links at the bottom of this page.
4. Re-read books to your child and enable them to re-read books to you as well.
Children often ask adults to re-read books to them over and over again. Whilst this might be overly repetitive and frustrating for you, your child will benefit hugely from this. These benefits include:
- a feeling of comfort derived from familiarity.
- developing their awareness of the rhythms, patterns and intonations of language.
- building comprehension (with your child noticing new things and understanding the text/illustrations on a deeper level with each re-reading).
This research with children in the early years found the benefits of re-reading books to children included increased vocabulary, improved interest in books and concentration levels.
You may have wondered why your child is asked to re-read their school book more than once. The first time they read it, they have to concentrate on decoding accurately (working out what the words say). During subsequent re-readings they are working on building their fluency (an important part of the National Curriculum for reading). Initially this may be simply reading the words more confidently and with increased speed. During further re-readings they might be ready to think about the use of expression and you can support them by discussing how some sentences could be read with appropriate intonation.
5. Provide additional texts that your child can read (with your support)
If your child’s school doesn’t provide enough texts for them to read to you regularly during the holidays, you may need to find some suitable additional texts yourself. Ideally these will be a good match to the phonics your child is learning at school. To make this easier for you, I am offering 4 free samples of phonics poems your child will be able to read to/with you at home. These are taken from 10 complete poetry sets, which are available to purchase and cover the phonics generally taught in schools across Reception and Y1. 2 of the samples are suitable for Reception children and 2 are suitable for Y1 children. Each poem comes with a script you can use to help you introduce the poem to your child, along with some follow up questions.
